Friday, January 27, 2006

A tourist's guide to the British peoples

Much as I like Americans, they have a collective intellectual blind spot when it comes to distinguishing between the various inhabitants of the Briddish Isles. So I’ve come up with this handy guide which you can cut out and keep for next time you visit (or just print it off if you don’t want to damage your monitor).

The Scotch

Scotland is in the extreme north of England and is occupied by the Scotch. The country was invented in the late 13th century by William of Orange, a hairy primitive type with an Australian accent who tried to break part of the British landmass away from its moorings. He was defeated. Since then, the Scotch have nursed a chip on their shoulders the size of Greenland. Your Scotchman is generally freckled and bearded, and has a sentimental streak, especially when in his cups, though don’t be lulled into a false sense of safety because that beery bonhomie can turn at the nudge of a pint glass into blind, savage violence. The Scotch tongue is abnormally swollen which means that all consonants and most vowels are pronounced with a prolonged roll of the tonguetip against the front of the hard palate. The incomprehensibility of the Scotch language has led some scholars to question whether it can in fact be classified as a method of communication at all.

Native Scotch dishes include Scotch the drink (after which the people take their name), deep-fried shortbread, and haggis, which is a spherical construction of offal and teeth the size and shape of a football (or fitba, in the local argot). The men wear a green Burberry-check skirt called a sporran, and the women wear very little. The country’s overwhelming preoccupation with hatred of the English over the centuries has left little time for cultural or scientific development, and apart from the odd minor contribution in these areas – the discovery of penicillin, the invention of television and the telephone, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Annie Lennox – it is generally agreed that the dark ages still hold sway north of Hadrian’s Wall. Apart from all this, your Scotch is generally an amicable companion as long as you don’t get him started on that hoary old myth about English people having no knowledge of his nation’s history or lifestyle.

The Irish

The Irish live in Ireland, or Eireland as they quaintly call it, which is just across the Irish Sea which gives the island, Ireland, its name. What a beautiful country this is, with its rugged countryside of green rolling hills alternating with marshes, and laced throughout with forests [have to check that last bit – ed.]. The Irish are a delightful folk who dress to match the natural beauty of their verdant land. They love craic, which is not as it sounds an act of aggression but rather a type of mildly alcoholic beverage (sobriety is valued deeply). A peace-loving people, they have recorded not a single act of violence in the last 500 years. Every Irish home has a fiddle, which is played with gusto at each mealtime and social occasion. The fiercely religious nature of Irish society led to the forced expulsion of the only homosexual Irishman, Oscar Wilde, in the 19th century. Great storytellers, these charming folk have kept alive a rich heritage of myth and legend through the years, notable examples being the Great Potato Famine and Bloody Sunday; although it must be said that certain seditious elements have in recent years tried to brainwash the unsuspecting populace into believing that there is historical truth in these fantastic tales.

The Cornish and the Manx

These offshoots from the main British line became extinct in the early part of the 20th century, although scientists have talked of recreating them using recombinant DNA techniques.

The Welsh

A low-browed, squat, hirsute group of valley-dwellers, extant examples include musician David Gray and actor Rhys Ifans. Your typical Welsh presents a paradox in that his beautiful singing voice is at odds with his grotesque appearance. Like the Scotch, the Welsh have abnormal tongue anatomy and this results in the tip of the organ lingering in the front of the mouth whenever the letter L is pronounced. Rumours of the sighting of bizarre Welsh-sheep hybrids scampering through the valleys are obviously wholly unfounded, as even sheep have their standards. The Welsh contribution to world cuisine is represented by the rarebit, and to popular culture by the alcoholic poet Bob Dylan. Those Welsh who are not Papist are to be found dancing naked around ancient menhirs on pagan festival days, worshipping Bacchus and other earth gods. Notoriously untrustworthy, the people have given their name to the American verb towelsh. They have their own prince.

The English

“Has ever nature beheld such a race of warriors? Fleet of foot and with the musculature of a Bronze age Greek, the four winds rippling through his flaxen hair, the Englishman strikes down his foe with fire and stone, yet ever-present mercy stays his hand when that enemy be vanquished. That cunt Hitler doesn’t know what’s coming.”

- Winston Churchill, the House of Commons, 3 September 1939

Sixty-seven years is a long time, and Sir Winston would scarcely recognise his people today. In fact the only thing ‘bulldog’ about the English today is their faces. The world-renowned Empire lies in ruins. Savile Row, once the last word in style, has been supplanted by sports shops with whose wares the drunken, mewling, self-pitying, self-righteous, wife-beating, sexually incontinent, television-addicted, illiterate, innumerate, cultureless, feckless, deadbeat dross of humanity are pleased to deck themselves. Obsessed by breasts, bottoms, defecation and farting, these moral and intellectual smurfs waste every second of their lives trying to exist as close to the level of the reptile as possible. Their proud aspersions on the rest of the continent of which their country is a part, reflects their cosmic, terrifying insecurity about themselves. Smaller in number is the subset of the English known as the Nobs. These beings retain the stiff backbone that conquered the world, but this is because they have been forced to lie prone throughout their years of secondary education while being rogered up the rectum by a floppy-haired psychopath called Crispin. They are effete wastrels, walling themselves off from their unwashed brethren and frittering their utterly pointless lives away in parallel fashion. I shall not go into much detail about a third group, the middle classes, as they are an irrelevance, spending as they do all their lives on the Internet.

So there you have it. Hope you enjoy your visit.

Update!

Seems I've made one or two errors in the above piece. Smart-arse Michael the Tubthumper sorts it all out here.

Thanks for the clarity, Mr. Eater. Your elucidation of the ethnic differences makes me proud to be half-Irish. I used to hate that while growing up because of my whiteness and unruly hair, but I have learned to accept those things. I can always wear a hat and rub on a tan from a bottle.

Why should you be interested in a crummy little victory like that, Dr Evil? After all, you're going to be taking over the world soon, aren't you? I imagine you're planning a John Lennonesque paradise for us - no countries, no possessions, etc.